Call centre blues

I wonder whether automated switchboards and call centres really save companies money. They certainly don't help the consumer.

Take the last couple of week as an example. I've several times had to start again with an automated switchboard, as the option I needed wasn't there and neither was there an option to speak to an adviser. I've spoken to call centre operators in India. They recited the questions on their crib sheets in perfect English. It's sad that they didn't have enough practice in understanding English accents to distinguish between different digits comprising a phone number, let alone our sometimes unfortunately pronounced place names. On the first two occasions, promised confirmations never appeared. I wasn't confident that the resulting promise of action was going to yield the required result so a confirmation seemed essential. When it finally arrived it was in the form of a somewhat ambiguous email, so I started the whole process over again. I now live in hopes that a final conversation with someone actually in the UK was informed enough that I should stop worrying.

I really don't understand the philosophy of outsourcing jobs to other countries in a time of recession, but it might just work if staff there were given enough training. They know how to do their jobs, but without lengthy stays in England they aren't going to understand British colloquialisms, let alone some of our quirkier regional accents. On automated exchanges I have even less patience. This recent experience has cost me upwards of an hour of my time and has resulted in me tying up the call centre operatives of the company I'm dealing with on multiple occasions, when once should have been enough.

My plea to all companies considering outsourcing would be to remember that a basic grasp of speaking English isn't sufficient and will waste your staff's productivity as well as annoying your customers. As for automated exchanges, you need to test these with a much wider range of scenarios and ensure that the poor customer does not have to wade through half a dozen levels only to fail at the final hurdle.